Personal Essay | How has a place influenced you?

        The small chunk of the Berlin wall was triangular and impressively symbolic to my seven-year-old self in every way.  As I grew up, it represented a connection to Europe, a place I could only dream about, and aspire to one day see.  It also held a story, of segregation, and political boundaries that a seven-year-old should not be questioning. I wondered what this piece could mean, and I think that the newfound curiosity I had when I received this piece triggered my long lasting interest in war history. It was given to me as a gift from my grandmother, found in my deceased grandfather’s possessions, and looking for a faithful and permanent home.  It had deep scratches that looked like cuts on its face.  The red paint smeared across it still resembles blood to me, caused by these deep cuts, and I can only fathom the real blood involved with the construction and destruction of the Berlin Wall It was hard to imagine how far this small piece had travelled, and whose hands had protected it so that it could rest on this windowsill.  It was the most historic, and realistic artifact there, since the Great Wall of China that lay next to it seemed much less than great, and the delicate tulips on its other side were plastic and miniature as well.  

        The tulips also came from my grandmother, but in a different, and much less formal way.  When I received the tulips, they were duct-taped to a post card from Holland, painted with soft pastel petals and elegant green stems.  But since then, the paint has chipped off and worn away over the years.  Now the post card rests far from the flowers in a picture box along with other photos and memories that are safely packed away from sunlight and judgmental eyes. But when I was seven, and peeled the tulips from the duct-tape, I could only appreciate the fact that these small plastic flowers resembled three small buds in gardens filled with millions of their kind, much like the photograph on the postcard.  Although the Dutch flowers reminded me of the place that my family was from, being seven had its benefits.  Even though I wanted so badly to know about my family, I was able to stay next to the dull windowsill and admire the colors of the flowers, instead of longing to visit the real ones that grew thousands of miles away.  As I looked at those petals, I saw the most beautiful of rainbows thrown across them, and followed the light to the final trinket laying next to the previous three.

        It was a small gold figurine of a horse, with a crystal in the middle.  I was seven years old, innocent, and entirely believed my five-year-old brother when he told me that it was a real diamond.  I woke every morning and admired the rainbows that it cast across my room.  But what I really admired was the place that this horse came from.  In a small marketplace in Kosovo, my aunt spotted the beautiful creature, hidden beneath cheaper plastic toys, and asked the shop keep to take it out for her.  She purchased it for me, and after a long week it arrived at my house in a shipping van that seemed much too large for such a small box.  But this trinket was different than the rest because it didn’t have a story.  It was not as simple as a national flower, or a historical artifact.  It was an item with an unknown history that I was responsible for and set out to retrieve.  

        I like to think that someday I will find the story behind the small horse, or see the beautiful tulip fields.  I would love nothing more than to walk the Great Wall of China, or see where my small part of Berlin originally belonged.  I still wake up in the morning and see those rainbow colors strewn across my bedroom walls, and think about when I was seven, and how simple these pieces were.  I looked at them without focusing on the backdrop through the window.  But that miserable backdrop was always the same, and it will most likely remain that way, filled with eerily similar houses and fake looking green grass.  The world that rests outside that window has no history, and no meaning, but the trinkets tell different stories of far off places, beautiful gardens, and daring adventures.  I am inspired by these trinkets to find a new place, and discover a new world for myself, outside of the hopelessly unforgiving climate of Nova Scotia. I want to experience more than the feeling of isolation that the view outside of this window portrays for me today.